Dear Elvis, When You Wrote

Dallas Lee

what got you started?
A nudge in heart or loins?
A yearning for your own Beguine?
The warm flesh imagined
beneath the pious skirts of your dreams?
To go on loving her until
in the end she loves me too.
Sounds like you, doesn’t it? But no,
Vincent Van Gogh wrote those lines.
About a woman whose never, no, never
taunted and smoldered for all his time.
Maybe still. If you see him, ask.
Perhaps he’ll recite the lines that followed:
The more she disappears
the more she appears.
Not bad – for a painter, I reckon.
If you’re up there, Elvis, let me know:
Is absence of envy a blessing of Heaven’s?